NY Times to YA Publishing: Stop Being So Girly
There’s much that’s wrong with Lipsyte’s screed about gendered stories–starting with the fact that insisting that readers occupy a gender binary leaves no room for transgendered and gender neutral readers, or readers struggling with gender identity–but the most inherently offensive to me, as a writer, reader, and former tutor of kids who fall within YA’s mythical audience of “reluctant readers,” is that it perpetuates the awful idea that just having a good story isn’t enough. This argument ignores the success of books like Thirteen Reasons and pretends that they are isolated phenomena that have no relation to reality–a reality in which, according to Lipsyte, boys need “hard-core boy talk” about things like sports (girls don’t play those!), male bonds, and physical contact, while girls are presumably off standing in line buying Justin Bieber tickets. But all this argument does is further isolate boys inside of harmful gender stereotypes that we should be trying to dismantle.